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OLYMPIA — The state Liquor Control Board on Wednesday approved an emergency ban of caffeinated alcohol drinks, the type of beverage that sickened nine Central Washington University students last month during an off-campus party. In the unanimous vote, commissioners said they took the action because of public health and safety concerns. The ban will take effect at 12:01 a.m. on Nov. 18 and remain in place for 120 days while the board goes through rule-making procedures for a permanent ban. Gov. Chris Gregoire is expected to hold a news conference shortly regarding the ban. In a news release last month,...

LOUT Laura Hall is the first person to be banned from buying or drinking booze ANYWHERE in the country. Magistrates slapped the Drinking Banning Order (DBO) on Hall after she was involved in a run of alcohol-related public order offences. Cops argued strict measures were needed to deal with the 20-year-old's drunken behaviour. The DBO means Hall is not allowed in any pub, club, off-licence or bar in England and Wales for the next two years. She is also banned from buying booze - or having alcohol in an unsealed container or drinking in any public place. And she must...

A campaign to create a new category of driving while intoxicated is being promoted at the Capitol as one way to curb growing problems in Texas' system of punishing drunken drivers. Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo, among the supporters of the change, said the idea behind a new offense of "driving while ability impaired" — DWAI — would cover drivers whose blood-alcohol content is between 0.05 and 0.07

The evening of Jan. 16, 1920, hours before Prohibition descended on America, while the young assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt, drank champagne in Washington with other members of Harvard's Class of 1904, evangelist Billy Sunday preached to 10,000 celebrants in Norfolk, Va., : "The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. . . ." Not exactly. Daniel Okrent's darkly hilarious "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition" recounts how Americans abolished a widely exercised private right -- and condemned the nation's fifth-largest industry -- in order to make the nation more...

A dash-cam video of the DUI arrest of Sheldon Killpack last January shows the then-Senate majority leader weaving slightly, brushing a center line and clipping a curb after the Highway Patrol trooper's lights turned on and he pulled off the road. "Talking with you I can smell the alcohol. How much alcohol have you had tonight?" asks Utah Highway Patrol Trooper Raymond Thomson. Killpack, wearing a black baseball cap and sweater vest, initially tells the trooper that he had not been drinking and the smell was his passenger, who was later identified as lobbyist and former state Rep. Mark Walker....

BP's directors plan to suspend the oil giant's dividend payment, the BBC has learned. BBC business editor Robert Peston says that the directors are to meet on Monday to make a formal decision. However, any formal announcement will not be made until after negotiations with the US president on Wednesday.

DALLAS (CBS 11 / TXA 21) ― North Dallas resident Micah Harleaux has nothing but fond memories of his best friend who was killed in a drunken driving accident. "Carl was an extremely funny individual, he had a biting sense of humor," Harleaux said. "He was full of life." Carl Lotspeich was killed nearly a year ago when a drunken driver slammed into the 25-year-old's car on the Dallas Tollway. The driver, who also died, was heading the wrong way. "There are advancements in automobiles like seat belts and air bags to protect not only the driver but also those...

Raleigh is working with Anheuser-Busch on a deal for the naming rights to the city's new downtown amphitheater, but state liquor regulators are hesitant to approve such a deal, WRAL News has learned. The City Council last week voted to name the venue the Bud Light Amphitheater for an undisclosed sum, according to a statement signed by City Clerk Gail Smith. "This will help us pay for a very substantial portion of the amphitheater. So we are hopeful that it will be approved," Mayor Charles Meeker said Wednesday. Doug Grissom, assistant director of the Raleigh Convention Center, which operates the...

African societies have proverbs for every situation, drinking included. “He who is drunk from palm wine can sober up, he who is drunk from wealth cannot,” say Nigerians. Such proverbs and wise sayings on alcohol were invariably about men, since in most traditional settings, drinking was primarily an indulgence of the adult male. African drinks most of them illicit, come with quirky, drunken names. While Kenya has chang’aa or “kill-me-quick,” Botswana takes the gold in naming its backyard brews. It has Tho-tho-tho, (the dizzy spell), a lala fa (you sleep right here), laela mmago (say goodbye to your mother) chechisa...

The UK Department of Health recently announced that it would loosen hygiene rules for Muslim and Sikh doctors and nurses. From now on, Muslim female staff will not need to wash their hands before procedures as it compromises their modesty. Instead, they will have the admittedly less sanitary option of wearing disposable plastic over-sleeves. Acknowledging the danger of microbes and death, a Department of Health spokesman said, “The guidance is intended to . . . balance infection control measures with cultural beliefs.” But, believe it or not, from a culturist perspective, the death of some patients is not the main...

A father-of-four has been banned from driving for three years after getting behind the wheel of a toy car when drunk. Paul Hutton, 40, was over the legal alcohol limit when he climbed into the seat of a 4ft by 2ft electric Barbie car, which has a top speed of just 4mph. A police patrol car spotted the 6ft-tall former RAF aeron Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1267136/Father-banned-driving-getting-wheel-toy-Barbie-car-drunk.html#ixzz0lY2qUqd4

First he banned booze in his Kabul headquarters. Now the notoriously austere commander of US and Nato forces has a new target in his war on terror: ice cream and fast food. General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of Special Forces in Iraq, who runs eight miles a day, eats one meal and sleeps for only four hours a night, has given orders to close the junk food concessions on Nato bases. No longer will the fighter pilots at Bagram or Kandahar airfields be able to ring Pizza Hut to deliver. Once General McChrystal has his way, the Whoppers will...

In the wake of the discovery that RNC money had been used for an outing at a lesbian/bondage club Gawker found this little item in the RNC's filings with the FEC: According to the LA Times"About $400 spent at a liquor store on Capitol Hill was classified in the report as "office supplies.'' A person answering the phone at Congressional Liquors said the store sells no office supplies."

Teachers are demanding the right to get drunk at weekends as they protest against a tough new code of conduct. More than 10,000 have signed a petition calling for the scrapping of rules which require them to uphold 'public trust' in their profession outside school. The code, drawn up by the General Teaching Council [GTC] and coming into force next month, aims to reinforce the traditional role of teachers as pillars of society. It urges teachers to act as role models for pupils inside and outside the classroom by maintaining 'reasonable standards in their own behaviour'. One teacher, who asked...

The early baby boomers may be known as the generation of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. But it turns out, they're hitting the bottle pretty hard as they age, as well. And that portends significant alcohol-related health problems ahead as those mid-lifers become seniors. A new study finds that among men and women 50 to 64 years old, almost 1 in 4 men and 1 in 10 women is a "binge" drinker -- meaning that at some point in the last 30 days, he or she has downed four (for women) or five (for men) servings of alcohol in...

MOSCOW, June 26 (Reuters) - Cheap and illicit alcohol kills more than half Russian men and women in their most productive years and the government must act urgently to reverse the trend, a study to be published in The Lancet at the weekend said. "Excessive alcohol consumption in Russia, particularly by men, has in several recent years caused more than half of all the deaths at ages of 15-54 years," the Lancet article said. The research conducted in three industrial cities -- Tomsk, Barnaul and Biysk -- said "excess mortality from liver cancer, throat cancer, liver disease, and pancreatic disease...

Beverly Anderson is mad as hell. She just started to get tickets for parking in her own driveway. That's right. The District of Columbia is ticketing people who park their cars in their own driveways. ---- So what does the law say? "Any area between the property line and the building restriction line shall be considered as private property set aside and treated as public space under the care and maintenance of the property owner." ----------- Basically what that means is most property owners in the District don't own the land between their front door and the sidewalk, but they...

For the past 20 years, the U.S. has maintained a Minimum Legal Drinking Age of 21 (MLDA21), with little public debate about the wisdom of this policy. Recently, however, more than 100 college and university presidents signed the Amethyst Initiative, a public statement calling for "an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21-year-old drinking age." SNIP Our research compares traffic fatality rates in states before and after they changed their MLDA from 18 to 21. In contrast to all earlier work, however, we examined separately the impact in states that adopted an MLDA21 on their own...

TO the anger of the wine industry and disbelief of lovers of a good drop worldwide, the French Government has told its people to stop drinking wine. The French Health Ministry has made alcohol one of the chief villains in a drive against cancer. "The consumption of alcohol, and especially wine, is discouraged," say guidelines drawn from the findings of the National Cancer Institute. A single glass of wine a day will raise the chance of contracting cancer by up to 168 per cent, claims the ministry's brochure. Forget those 1980s findings that antioxidants in wine were good for health,...

A proposed new ordinance that would allow Iowa City police to breath-test wait staff and entertainers at bars and restaurants could put bar owners at risk for fines and lost liquor licenses.... In the proposal, an employee could be fined the $500 maximum for having a blood-alcohol concentration of .02 or higher. "It's probably going to pass," Councilor Mike O'Donnell said. "The thought is that if you're not intoxicated, you can be more accurate when checking IDs and keeping people safe in the bar."